It Ends Tonight

This song details the end of a relationship, but it's not about breaking up with a girlfriend - it's not even about a girl. Written by lead singer Tyson Ritter and guitarist Nick Wheeler, Nick told us the story in our 2012 interview: "Ty was just getting really good at telling stories in songs. That one was about a dude, but he thinks it's fun to make it sound like it was about a girl or a relationship."

The dude is their guitar tech who joined them for a songwriting session in Atlanta. Says Wheeler, "He's our buddy from home. He's been touring with us for the past couple of years, and he came just to help us out with gear and keep things in order. He's moral support - he's just a great dude to have around. But he was significantly older than us at the time, and he acts like an old man: going to bed early, really being a bum around Ty. Because Ty's a night owl. He wanted to stay up, he wanted to hang out. His roommate was just bringing him down. Mike and Chris and I were in the nonsmoking room. So we didn't really see this, but he was getting frustrated and fed up with this guy bringing things down, and we wrote this song (laughing). Ty used to introduce it, he was like, 'This song's about wanting to kill your best friend.' So that is true."

This was a track from The All-American Rejects second album, and along with "Move Along," it was one of the last ones written. Nick Wheeler told us, "we were at our wits' end wondering if we were ever going to get to make a second record. Our manager and our guy just kept saying, 'Keep writing, keep writing.' All we knew was, hey, man, we wrote 11 songs and that's all we had to our name when we made the first record. We have more than that, let's just go make a record. Thankfully they pushed us to our wits' end, because the last two songs we wrote for our second record were 'Move Along' and 'It Ends Tonight,' which were both Top-10 songs. And those actually came pretty easily once it started flowing."